Chapter Text
“Chaos… simply deals with unpredictability in complex systems. The shorthand is the Butterfly Effect. A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park you get rain instead of sunshine.” - Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
Despite being the only member of the literature club to be in the final year of high school, Yuri preferred to spend her mornings before class started in the classroom where their club typically met. She wasn’t the only one - though only one of the four girls actually had homeroom in this particular classroom, it wasn’t unusual for all four of them to meet up before class.
Yuri had come to value this morning ritual with her friends - for, yes, she was beginning to see the other three girls as her friends. It was a strange, but warm, feeling to finally have other girls who she could consider friends.
It was a morning like many others. Yuri was sitting at a desk reading a chapter of her latest book purchase. Nearby, Natsuki and Monika were talking to one another, Natsuki grumbling that she hadn’t had the time to eat breakfast that morning. Sayori was late. Nothing was particularly out of the ordinary about any of this.
Not two minutes later, Sayori rushed in.
“I’m here! I’m here!” She exclaimed, drawing the attention of not only her friends, but the other students hanging out in the classroom before class as well.
“Sayori,” Monika began in a chiding tone, but didn’t get a chance to actually chide, as Sayori blurted out:
“I made it on time today! The bell hasn’t even rung yet! Hey, Yuri, aren’t you proud of me?”
Yuri couldn’t help but give a small smile, even if Sayori looked a mess. Deciding to not point out that Sayori’s socks weren’t even a matching pair today, she nodded.
“Natsuki?” Sayori leaned on the desk that Natsuki was sitting at. “Yuri is proud of me for making it on time!”
“Ehh?” Yuri blushed a little. Why was Sayori so concerned with telling Natsuki about what she thought?
A bit more abrasively than usual, Natsuki shooed her friend’s hands off the desk.
“Can you back off?! It’s like you’ve never heard of personal space!”
“Natsuki,” Monika turned her chiding tone onto the smaller girl. “Sayori didn’t mean any harm.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child!” Natsuki snapped at Monika. “Just because you’re the club leader doesn’t mean you have to be so condescending!”
A silence hung between the four club members for just a few seconds. Natsuki could have a temper sometimes, they all knew that, but this seemed pretty excessive this early in the morning.
“Natsuki!” Sayori pouted, pressing her index fingers together. “That was mean, even for you!”
And then something happened that no one expected. Suddenly - quite suddenly, quite out of nowhere - Natsuki burst into sobs.
“N-Natsu-!” Yuri began, taken aback. Something was definitely out of the ordinary, here.
But clearly Natsuki had been expecting this reaction least of all. Unable to control her tears, the smaller girl’s cheeks flushed before she fled the club room, seemingly in embarrassment.
Sayori, to her credit, at least looked apologetic. She clearly hadn’t meant for her words to come off the way they had. Sayori never meant to hurt anybody.
“Maybe I should go apologize-” she began, but was cut off by Monika:
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. Yuri, maybe you should go after her.”
“M-me?” Yuri stammered, feeling her own cheeks begin to flush as well.
“She trusts you more than anyone else in the club, after all,” Monika flashed a warm, knowing smile.
‘She does?’ Yuri wondered to herself. She hadn’t even been aware that Monika and Sayori knew that she and Natsuki were friends now. And it wasn’t even as if they were particularly close friends, at that. Sure, they ate lunch together in their stairwell sometimes…
Oh.
Of course.
Without saying anything further to the others, Yuri stood up and began walking towards “their” stairwell. The stairwell she and Natsuki read together in, the stairwell she’d once helped Natsuki through a panic attack in.
Even as the bell rang, and students walked past her on their way to class, she didn’t stop. Sure enough, Natsuki was seated on the bottom stair, trying and failing to get her tears under control.
“Go away!” She exclaimed when she saw Yuri. “Just- just go away, Yuri. Get to class.”
Yuri didn’t go away. She simply sat next to her friend on the stairs, trying to think of what she could say that wouldn’t make it worse. Right now, her main priority was to calm Natsuki down.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Natsuki tried turning her face away to hide, as if Yuri didn’t already know that she was crying.
“I wasn’t going to make you,” Yuri responded, trying her best to keep her voice level and calm. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I’m fine,” Natsuki insisted, even though both girls knew for a fact that wasn’t true.
“It’d be okay if you weren’t. You… you already know I don’t mind if you’re not…”
“I just-!” Natsuki wiped her tears on the sleeve of her jacket, only for more tears to take their place. Really, she was a mess. Bending over and burying her face in her skirt, her voice came out muffled and tiny, “I just really miss my mom…”
“Your… mom?” Yuri asked, feeling powerless when the only response she got was a pathetic little sniffle. She’d never heard Natsuki bring up her mom before.
It made a strange sort of sense, though. Natsuki had, of course, mentioned her father here and there. Her father didn’t approve of his daughter’s manga collection, after all - that’s why it was kept in the club room. It made sense that Natsuki’s mother wasn’t in the picture.
Yuri wondered if she was dead or if she was missing. Maybe she’d just left the family of her own accord…
Another sniffle snapped her out of these thoughts, and Yuri felt a small spike of shame. It didn’t matter right now what had happened to Natsuki’s mom. What mattered was that her friend was struggling.
Yuri placed a gentle hand on Natsuki’s trembling shoulder. What she really wished she could do was to pull her crying friend into her arms, but she somehow didn’t think Natsuki would allow such a display of affection. After all, what if someone walked by and saw?
“You’d better not say ‘it’s okay’ or something dumb like that,” Natsuki choked out between muffled sobs, not lifting her head.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Yuri responded calmly.
“G-good!”
True to her word, the taller girl stayed quiet until Natsuki calmed down. And eventually, finally, the tears subsided, leaving embarrassment in their place.
“Natsuki?”
“Don’t,” Natsuki said. “It’s not like that’s gonna happen again. So can we just forget it?”
“Are… you sure?”
“I just didn’t sleep well, that’s all!”
“That makes sense,” Yuri nodded. “Lack of sleep can definitely cause some problems with emotional regulation. Were you stressed about something?”
“No, just… hungry. I didn’t have dinner.”
“But,” Yuri furrowed her brow, “you said earlier you hadn’t eaten breakfast…”
Natsuki seemed to realize her mistake. Her eyes widened, and though she’d been blushing before, her cheeks now went almost as red as her hair accessories.
“Natsuki… have you not had anything to eat since lunch yesterday?”
The smaller girl didn’t say anything, looking away quickly. But Yuri knew her hunch was correct. Otherwise, Natsuki would have had no problem denying it.
She frowned. Why on earth had Natsuki gone so long without eating? It didn’t make much sense. She must not have had all the information. After all, she certainly didn’t tell Natsuki every single detail about her own life.
Regardless of how much sense it made to Yuri, Natsuki needed help right now. Before she could talk herself out of it, Yuri stood up and grabbed Natsuki’s wrist, pulling the smaller girl to her feet as well.
“Y-Yuri! What-? Hey!” Natsuki halfheartedly protested, but ultimately let Yuri pull her along. “Where on earth are you taking me?”
Hm. Where was she taking her? She hadn’t thought that part through. She wasn’t usually as impulsive as the other club members. But she couldn’t exactly back out now.
“There’s a cafe not terribly far from campus,” she answered.
“Are you serious? We’re leaving school? We can’t do that, my dad will kill m- I mean, we’ll get in trouble!”
Ah. That was interesting. Even more determined now, Yuri only pulled Natsuki along faster.
“We won’t get in trouble if we move fast enough that no one sees us. Trust me, Natsuki…”
Natsuki deflated a little, but didn’t stop arguing completely, even as she was letting Yuri pull her out the school’s front door:
“W-well, you definitely don’t have to pay for me or anything!”
“I know I don’t have to. I’m offering anyway.”
“Yuri! I can’t let you do that!”
“Fine. I’m not offering, then. I’m demanding. Let me pay for you.”
Natsuki opened her mouth to argue some more. Then, she closed it abruptly. She sighed, “fine.”
“Fine?”
“Yeah. Fine. If you’re actually being assertive, it must be pretty important to you.” Natsuki seemed to be trying to look nonchalant… which was frankly ridiculous with the remnants of tears and snot still on her face. “Honestly, you’re being kind of a pain about it, but if you insist, who am I to stop you?”
Yuri felt a heat rise to her cheeks, but she couldn’t help but smile just a little bit. It was so subtle that most people probably wouldn’t have noticed it, but Natsuki really had come so far in the last few months. When Yuri had first met her, the smaller girl never would have given in so easily, if at all.
The local cafe wasn’t anything special, but it had decent enough tea and coffee drinks, and a small menu of pastries and sandwiches. It was popular with some of the other upperclassmen due to its low prices. Natsuki’s pastel pink hair stuck out against the dark woods of the cafe.
Yuri got herself some tea and her friend a hot chocolate and a sandwich.
Natsuki, for her part, seemed to be doing her best to look anywhere but at Yuri. At least she wasn’t resisting the act of eating her sandwich.
“Is… is it good?” Yuri asked. She was normally fine sitting in silence, but she still had so many questions about the morning’s outburst, and she wasn’t quite sure how to even begin asking for the information she wanted. It wasn’t as if she had any right to that information, after all.
“Mm-hm.”
“You’re just… being awfully quiet.”
“I’m… embarrassed, alright?” Natsuki sunk down into her seat a little. “It’s not like I wanted to start crying like that! And Sayori probably thinks I’m mad at her now, doesn’t she?”
“Sayori will understand,” Yuri answered. Even as she said it, she made a mental note to text Sayori directly to let the other girl know Natsuki wasn’t mad. She didn’t want Sayori to worry too much. Subtly pulling out her phone under the table, she saw a text from Monika, reading, ‘Don’t worry about Sayori. I’ll talk to her. You take care of Natsuki, and we’ll see you two tomorrow.’
Yuri felt a weight lift off her shoulders. She didn’t know what she would do without Monika’s friendship.
“Besides, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” she added. “We are friends, aren’t we?”
When Natsuki didn’t respond, Yuri began to panic just a little. Had she made a mistake? Was it stupid to offer help like this? What if Natsuki was insulted?
“Yeah,” Natsuki finally said. “We’re friends. You’re actually probably one of the best friends I have. You and the rest of the club. Sorry, it’s just… it’s still really hard for me to be open with my emotions. But I’m trying. And I… I…”
“...yes?”
Natsuki mumbled something inaudible.
“P-pardon?” Yuri asked.
“I said…” a heavy sigh punctuated the sentence, “I… I really appreciate you doing this for me. You didn’t have to.”
“I already said that I wanted to.”
“No, but-! Yuri, you’re always…” Natsuki seemed almost frustrated. With herself? “You’re always so nice to me. I just don’t get it.”
“I already told you that-”
“No, I know. I know you’ve said all that nice stuff to me, but I was being such a brat earlier.”
“You were tired and hungry,” Yuri pointed out. “We’re fixing the hungry part. We can fix the tired part after.”
“We’re not going back to school?”
“Do you want to go back to school?”
Uh oh. Maybe she’d been a bit too hasty in pulling Natsuki out to this cafe. It wasn’t like they could march back into the building halfway through class. It figured - the one time she didn’t overthink something, she’d gone too far in the other direction and not thought it through at all.
“Not really,” Natsuki said, taking a sip of her drink.
“Then… we won’t,” Yuri replied, surprising even herself. What was it about Natsuki that made her constantly discover new sides to herself? “We can go to the park. I go there to read sometimes, when the weather is nice. There are a lot of shady spots.”
“That sounds… nice. Let’s do that.”
And so the unlikely pair of friends made their way to the park. Yuri, despite her burning curiosity, tried to keep the conversation light. Natsuki ended up taking a little nap in the grass, and Yuri sat nearby, reading a book from her bag and losing track of the time.
When Natsuki woke up some time later, her hair was a bit mussed, falling into her face as her ribbons and hairclip had come loose sometime during the nap.
“Wuh?” the small girl sat up, a little disorientated, and Yuri couldn’t help but chuckle a little at how cute it was, causing Natsuki to exclaim, “H-hey! Don’t laugh at me!”
“S-sorry!” Yuri blushed. “I wasn’t trying to… you just… your hairclip is falling out.”
“What?” Natsuki was suddenly alert. It was a little surprising. “Where is it?”
“Here,” Yuri’s hand found the red clip, handing it to her friend. “I didn’t realize it was more than just a simple hairclip to you.”
“My mom gave it to me,” Natsuki’s fingers deftly returned the hairclip to its usual prominent place, pinning her bangs to the side. “So it’s, like… pretty special…”
“What does the symbol mean?” Yuri asked. She’d never paid much attention to Natsuki’s hair accessories before, and she wasn’t quite sure what this clip was meant to represent. A stylized figure 8? An oddly angular butterfly?
“Honestly, I don’t even know. She never told me. And I can’t exactly ask her…”
Natsuki’s voice trailed off, as if she was - once again - just now realizing what she was saying.
Yuri decided to try a tactic she’d read about. She knew from experience asking Natsuki to open up didn’t end well - her friend seemed to hate being asked to be vulnerable. But she also knew that sometimes, saying nothing at all was the most effective way to get someone else talking.
So she said nothing. If Natsuki wanted to break the silence, Yuri trusted that she would.
Sure enough, after a few minutes, Natsuki laid back in the grass, gazing up in the clouds, and said:
“My dad always sucked, but he sucked a hell of a lot less when Mom was still around, y’know?”
Yuri said nothing.
“I mean,” Natsuki continued, “I guess you don’t know… I guess I don’t even really know. She just didn’t come home one day. I don’t know if she abandoned us or if she got kidnapped or what - that lazy asshole didn’t even call the cops about it.”
Yuri wondered if ‘that lazy asshole’ was Natsuki’s father. Still, she said nothing.
“He wasn’t always this bad, you know,” Natsuki’s eyes welled up with tears again, and she turned her face away from Yuri. “He started drinking a lot more after she disappeared. He comes home from work, locks the door, gets drunk, passes out - if I’m not home before him I have to sleep on the porch.”
Even Yuri, who was normally quiet, could not stay silent when she heard that.
“Natsuki, that’s horrible.”
“Don’t you think I know that?!” The smaller girl snapped. But it was like a dam had broken. Even if she didn’t want to be saying it, Natsuki couldn’t stop talking now. “And it’s not like his shitty construction job pays him enough to buy much more than booze, so we almost never have enough in the house for me to make anything! Even when we do, if I make a mess in the kitchen, he’ll completely flip out and-!”
Natsuki suddenly whimpered, cutting herself up by biting down on her own tongue.
“N-Natsuki!” Yuri gasped.
The tiny girl was beet red, clearly having figured out she was dangerously close to revealing just what, exactly, her dad did to her.
She didn’t have to. Yuri was pretty sure she had enough information to paint a pretty clear picture of what Natsuki’s home life was like. She felt her heart sink into her stomach. She’d had no idea her friend was suffering like this. She didn’t know how long it had been like this, either. Was Natsuki just small, or had it always been because of neglect and malnourishment?
There was just one thing she had to know.
“Can… can you answer one question for me? Just one?” She asked.
Eyes blown wide, Natsuki turned to face Yuri. She wasn’t crying again, thankfully, but the blush hadn’t left her face, and her eyes were a bit dewy. She didn’t say yes… but she didn’t say no, either.
Gathering all of her courage, Yuri asked:
“Does your father ever hurt you? Ph-physically?”
She knew, of course, that she was asking a lot of Natsuki.
Which is why it was a bit of a surprise when Natsuki admitted, “sometimes.”
Yuri bit her lower lip in concern.
“Mostly, he just ignores me, though,” the smaller girl continued. “I… don’t know which is worse…” Quickly, she added, “but you gotta promise not to tell anyone!”
“That’s really what you’re worried about?”
“I’m serious! Don’t tell anyone, not even Monika or Sayori! I just… I hate it when people look at me like I’m some sort of victim.”
Yuri decided not to point out that “victim” was exactly what her friend was. It didn’t seem to be a productive argument for them to have right now. But she couldn’t hide the anger that was boiling up inside of her.
“Natsuki… I once told you that if anyone ever laid a hand on you, I would unleash hell upon them,” she said darkly.
Natsuki looked down at the grass, her fingers absentmindedly plucking out some of the green blades.
“Yuri, you can’t go after my dad.”
“I don’t like how he treats you.”
“Yeah? Neither do I,” Natsuki snorted. “That’s why I couldn’t let you get anywhere near him. If he laid a hand on you the way he does to me-”
“Natsuki, why is it more okay to do it to you?” A wave of emotion suddenly coursing through her, Yuri found herself grabbing her friend’s small hands. It wasn’t okay that Natsuki was suffering like this! She wanted to do something about it!
Natsuki looked down at their hands and her face went completely red, her mouth slightly agape as if she was short circuiting.
“I-!” She stammered. “I-! Buh…”
Yuri realized what she had done, and dropped her friend’s hands, starting to blush herself. She always had blushed way too easily.
“Sorry,” Yuri apologized for her sudden emotional outburst.
“It’s… okay,” Natsuki’s ability to form sentences began to slowly return to her. “Really, it’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong. Today has just been a lot. But you’ve been great.”
Yuri furrowed her brows. “If that’s the case,” she said slowly, “why do you sound like there’s something else you aren’t saying?”
Natsuki sighed.
“I still have to go home after all this,” she pointed out.
Yuri recalled that the Literature Club functioned as kind of an escape for Natsuki. It made sense that her friend would dread going home at the end of the day, no matter how good or bad the day itself was.
She bit her lip, trying to figure out how to extend the escape. Even if it was only for one night, that was better than nothing, wasn’t it.
“What if… you didn’t go home tonight?” She finally asked.
“What?”
“What if you spent the night at my place?” Yuri continued. “Like… like a sleepover. Friends do that, right? And… and if you like it, then you’ll know where I live, so you can come by and have a place to sleep next time you get locked out.”
Natsuki, surprisingly, did not argue. Perhaps she just didn’t have it in her to argue anymore today.
“Okay,” Natsuki turned to hide her face. But Yuri could have sworn that she saw a small smile there.
The rest of the day, Yuri tried to focus on making things as uneventful as possible for Natsuki. They walked around the park a bit, getting street food from a vendor at one point with the money that was going to be for school lunch. They stopped into a bookstore on the way home that they had both been to before, but didn’t buy anything.
When enough time had passed that it wouldn’t be weird to show up at home, Yuri led Natsuki to her house. Her father wouldn’t be home from work yet, but her mother would most likely be. Natsuki’s only comment about that was that Yuri lived in the “same direction as Sayori,” relative to the school building.
Yuri’s mother was, indeed, home. Their house opened into the living room, and the elegant adult woman was currently sitting on the couch working on the sudoku puzzle in the newspaper. A mug of tea sat nearby, no longer steaming - possibly, her mother had forgotten brewing it.
Yuri steeled her nerves for what she was about to do. She had no doubt that her mother would say yes to Natsuki spending the night, but she still was a little nervous.
“Мама?” She bowed slightly to her mother, trying her hardest not to look at Natsuki. She didn’t really want to see the surprise in her friend’s eyes when she spoke in her mother’s native tongue. But she couldn’t ask in the language Natsuki understood - Natsuki was way too proud for that!
“Yuri?” her mother seemed surprised, both at her daughter’s tone and at the pink-haired stranger standing slightly behind. “What is it, Доча?”
Crap, what was the right term? Yuri swallowed, her throat suddenly feeling a bit dry, as she struggled to remember the correct grammar.
“мама, это мой друг Natsuki. Пожалуйста, она может остаться здесь?”
Yuri very deliberately did not look at Natsuki. She wasn’t sure if she was trying to spare herself the embarrassment or her friend.
“Сегодня вечером?” At least her mother responded in kind. “Kонечно, Yuri. Она вегетарианка?”
“Н-Нет,” Yuri shook her head, remembering Natsuki’s meal at the cafe earlier. Natsuki definitely wasn’t a vegetarian. Then, flustered, she remembered to thank her mother, “Спасибо, мама!”
“Пожалуйста,” her mother waved the girls off.
Red as a beet, Yuri turned and began to quickly walk towards her bedroom, dreading the questions that were inevitably about to follow. Was it really worth sparing Natsuki the embarrassment?
“You speak Russian at home?” Natsuki’s voice let Yuri know she was following the taller girl.
“S-sometimes,” Yuri admitted. “My Russian is really bad, actually. I’m not at all fluent, but my mom is…”
“Your mom’s Russian?”
“Her family were Soviet refugees, from Vladivostok. I’m half Russian.”
“You don’t look like it,” Natsuki blurted out. Then, she seemed to realize what she’d just said, and quickly pivoted with, “I-is that why you read so many Russian novels?”
“I don’t!” Yuri protested.
“You do too! That Markov book!”
Oh, right. Portrait of Markov was originally Russian, wasn’t it?
“I guess books like that were always around the house,” Yuri admitted. “I just… never thought of them as Russian books. They were just books.” She paused, then thought of something. “Please don’t tell the other club members.”
“What? Why? It’s not like they’d judge you or anything!”
“No, I know, it’s just… I don’t want anyone looking at me any differently. I don’t like standing out any more than I already do by being tall.”
“This is your room?” Natsuki changed the subject as they got to Yuri’s bedroom. “It’s very… you.”
“Is that… bad?” Yuri asked, looking around at her bedroom in a slight panic. What did Natsuki mean by that? Was it the decorative knife display that was the problem? Was it her bedspread - deep purple with lilies on it? Maybe it was the kakemono on the wall, or the essential oils diffuser?
“Of course it’s not bad, dummy,” Natsuki said. “It’s a compliment, I guess.”
“It is?”
“I… like you,” the smaller girl said, looking around the room herself now. “I mean- we’re friends. You said so yourself.”
“Right,” Yuri sighed. “Well… I have some homework to do that’s due at the end of the week, so…”
“Yeah, me too, I got an essay due on Monday that I should work on,” Natsuki took a seat on the floor.
“I’ll go make us some tea,” Yuri said. “And maybe I’ll put some eucalyptus oil in the burner to help us focus on our work.”
“I’ll take any help focusing that I can get. I really don’t want to write this essay.”
Yuri couldn’t help but smile a little at that.
The girls worked diligently until dinner. By that time, Yuri’s father had gotten home.
Dinner itself was uneventful. It was a simple meal of veggies, chicken, and rice. Yuri’s parents were polite, asking Natsuki questions about how the girls knew each other. Someone looking in from the outside likely wouldn’t have found anything unusual about the evening, other than Natsuki - at one point - leaning over to whisper to Yuri:
“How much am I allowed to take?”
“Hm? As much as you want.”
“Even if I want seconds?”
“Of course,” Yuri tried to sound reassuring. “Mama always makes enough for leftovers.”
It occurred to Yuri at more than one point during the night that this kind of normalcy may have been completely foreign to her friend. And every time she thought about that, she felt another twist in her chest. But despite the guilt over not noticing sooner, she was glad she could give Natsuki at least one normal night before the other girl had to return to her terrible home life.
And then it started to get to the time when they’d have to go to bed.
That’s when Yuri realized that Natsuki would have to share, well, everything. She’d have to wear something of Yuri’s for pajamas. She’d have to sleep in Yuri’s bed with her.
Trying her best to not blush, to not act like this was anything out of the ordinary, Yuri dug an old t-shirt out of a drawer, handing it to Natsuki.
“H-here,” she said. “You can borrow this to sleep in.”
“Thanks,” Natsuki accepted the shirt, holding it up. It was black, and would likely go down to almost her knees due to the height difference between the girls. “So, uh… am I sleeping on the couch, or…?”
“Actually, I thought we’d just share my bed. If that’s not too weird for you, that is.”
Oh god, was it weird? Had she made it weird? Yuri felt her cheeks go red, certain that she’d gone and ruined everything by making things weird-
“Okay,” Natsuki shrugged, cutting off that train of thought.
“...okay?”
“Yeah,” the smaller girl looked away, shifting her small amount of weight from one foot to the other. Yuri noticed that Natsuki was also blushing, which made her feel a little better. “I mean, I’ve never been to a sleepover before, so what the hell do I know about what’s normal?”
“I’ve never been to a sleepover before, either,” Yuri confessed. “Sayori invited me to one a couple months ago, but… I didn’t end up going…”
“My old friends just never invited me to hang out with them outside of school,” Natsuki answered with an anecdote of her own.
“Mm,” Yuri looked for her own pajama set. “I’m going to go change in the bathroom, alright?”
“Alright.”
Before Natsuki could say anything else, the taller girl fled to the bathroom.
Yuri looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, pushing her hair back out of her face the way she only did when alone. She sighed heavily, reflecting on everything that had happened today. She was sure her parents would find out she’d cut school, and they’d certainly be disappointed. Yuri hated disappointing them.
But what she really couldn’t stop thinking about was the girl who she knew was currently in her bedroom.
Natsuki had been suffering in silence for so long. And no one had figured it out. Yuri certainly hadn’t known about it. She remembered when she’d first met Natsuki, and how she’d judged the other girl for having immature taste. Guilt twisted in her stomach - had her comments unwittingly reminded Natsuki of something her father would say to her at home?
An urge began to form at the back of her mind, prickling under her skin, begging for release. She needed a release. If she wanted to go back in that bedroom and feel calm enough to be there for Natsuki, this tension needed to be released.
But hadn’t she promised herself that she’d stop? That the previous… incident… was the last time she’d do this?
The prickling feeling under her skin got stronger, and Yuri once again lied to herself, that this time for sure would be the last time.
She removed the knife from the bathroom drawer she kept it in, rolled up one sleeve, and pressed the blade into her skin, watching the red drip from her wrist down into the sink. She focused on breathing through the pain, feeling a strange sort of relief as she watched her own blood drip.
Now she could feel normal enough to be there for her friend.
She bandaged herself and cleaned up before brushing her teeth, changing into her pajamas - long-sleeved, of course - and returning to her bedroom.
Sure enough, Natsuki was positively swimming in Yuri’s shirt. The short girl was in the process of putting her hair accessories down on the nightstand.
“The bathroom is free if you need to use it,” Yuri said.
Her heart was still beating quickly, nervous about her secret being discovered. This was around the time that the relief normally started turning into shame, and tonight was no different. Yuri was ashamed that Natsuki had been suffering so much, and yet Yuri herself was the one so weak as to do that to herself.
Natsuki said nothing as she slipped out of the room, leaving Yuri with her thoughts. To distract herself, she put some lavender oil in her essential oil diffuser, grabbed a book from her shelf, and idly began to flip through it, skimming the first chapter even though she had read it before.
“What are you reading?” Natsuki’s voice surprised her. Yuri didn’t think she’d been skimming that long.
“Oh,” Yuri put the book back in the shelf, “just an old vampire book from a few years ago. It’s not important.”
“Vampires aren’t really my thing,” Natsuki wrinkled her nose a little.
“I figured as much.”
“Why… do you like them?”
That question was surprising, but Yuri appreciated it all the same. She crawled into bed and scooted over so that Natsuki would have room to lay down as well.
“I don’t read about vampires as much as I used to. But I used to be fascinated with the way vampiric literature explores themes of the tragedy of immortality, and the paradoxical simultaneous fear of death.”
“Oh,” Natsuki laid down next to her, turning on her side to face Yuri.
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m going to find something both of us can enjoy together,” Natsuki said.
“What? When did you decide this?”
“Just now, in the bathroom. I know you don’t really like manga, and I don’t really like horror, but I think if I try hard enough I can maybe find an anime we can watch together.”
“You don’t have to-!”
“And you didn’t have to do any of this for me,” Natsuki rolled over, turning her back to Yuri as she reached over to turn off the light on the nightstand. “I know I could just bake you something, and I’ll probably do that as well, but…”
Yuri followed suit, turning over to face the wall as Natsuki trailed off.
The two girls lay in the dark, in silence, for a few moments.
Natsuki broke the silence once more:
“Hey, Yuri?”
Her voice sounded small. Almost unsure.
“Yes?” Yuri asked, quietly.
“...thank you. For everything. It’s really not easy for me to ask for help, but… just thank you.”
“Of course. Anytime, Natsuki.”
“And also don’t tell anyone about any of this,” Natsuki quickly added.
“Of course,” Yuri said again. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“...hey, Yuri?”
“Yes?”
Natsuki took a breath, as if trying to gather her courage to admit something. Finally, she said, “I think you’re the best friend I’ve ever had. Even if we don’t like reading the same stuff.”
“Really?” Yuri was surprised, but she also couldn’t stop herself from smiling. She was glad it was dark in here.
“Yeah. You don’t have to make a big deal about it or anything-”
“I think I feel the same,” Yuri said. “About you, that is.”
Natsuki didn’t respond at first.
Then, very hastily, she said, “okay, good night!”
“Good night, Natsuki,” Yuri said with a smile, closing her eyes to go to sleep for the night.